MIKE PATTON | January 2013 | Believer Interview

In an industry where artistic recognition hangs upon
developing a specialized, signature style, Mike Patton has built a vehement
listenership through a steadily unfocused career. As a singer, he produces
strained screams, expressive croons, lyrical glossolalia, rappy chants, and
uses the wide range of extended vocal techniques most often heard in
contemporary classical music. His first band, Mr. Bungle, which he co-founded
while still a high schooler in Eureka, California, combined all these elements,
often within a single track. On all three of their records, the group
virtuosically ploughed through a string of precise genre parodies—dissonant jazz,
cartoon music, death metal, Middle Eastern and Hawaiian music, film scores, and
more—each musical moment a surprise, even after multiple listens.

In the early ’90s, Patton achieved mainstream notoriety
after he joined the peculiar hard-rock band Faith No More, whose pop-metal
singles became staples of MTV during its music-video era. The group’s tortuous
evolution inspired a generation of metalheads with omnivorous listening habits.
Because of his work with FNM, Patton is sometimes cited as a founder of the
rap-rock surge of the 2000s, a credit that incited his feud with the genre’s
other progenitor, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Patton has been a frequent collaborator with
saxophonist/composer John Zorn, an equally eclectic musician who produced Mr.
Bungle’s first record and has released several of Patton’s solo recordings on
his Tzadik label. Together, Patton and Zorn worked with the brutally
experimental groups Naked City and Moonchild, and in performances of COBRA, an
improvisational game in which players conduct each other with hand signals and
cue cards. Their collaborations have singularly bridged the cavernous gap
between avant-garde and pop audiences.

In recent years, Patton’s projects have become increasingly
adventurous, as has his choice in collaborators: Bjork, Norah Jones, Massive
Attack, Rahzel, and Dave Lombardo of Slayer. His newest project, Mondo Cane, is
an album of orchestral covers of Italian pop music from the 1950s and ’60s,
sung and arranged with loving sensitivity. He has also voice-acted in video
games (Left 4 Dead, The Darkness) and in the Hollywood film I Am Legend. In
1999, he helped to found the label Ipecac Recordings, through which he
continues to release his own projects—Fantômas, Tomahawk—along with a roster of
artists who reflect his unpredictable tastes.

Patton and I spoke in the basement of the Believer office in
San Francisco, where he lives. At the time of our conversation, he was moving
in to a new house and finishing a score for Derek Cianfrance’s upcoming film,
The Place Beyond the Pines.

—Ross Simonini

I. “WHAT DO I DO IF I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING?”

THE BELIEVER: Do you ever practice singing?

MIKE PATTON: Nope. Never have and probably never will.

BLVR: So you just make these sounds naturally?

MP: I started on a really basic level. I was just screaming.
Then I realized, Yeah, well, I’m OK at that. Let’s try some other things. And I
discovered this thing called singing. So I snuck it in every now and again. In
Mr. Bungle, we easily got bored with what we were doing, which was, at that
point, in the mid-’80s, death metal and hardcore, which has a very limited
palate. It’s so isolated up there [in Eureka, California], but I was lucky
enough to work at a record store, so I was able to hear different things. But
it wasn’t like we could go to a concert every night and get our minds blown.
And this is what I love about small-town bands or musicians. They gotta work
hard to be inspired. There were no venues when I lived there. There was a bar
and grill that played blues. There was a bowling alley for, like, five minutes.
We would pool together money and rent out a grange hall, like an Elks Lodge
type of place. We’d buy the insurance and put on a show. A few hundred people
would show up and we’d be happy. So I guess the answer to your question is: I
learned what I could do with my voice on stages and because of the people that
I was around. It wasn’t me sitting in a room by myself. I didn’t know what I
was doing. I was figuring it out on the fly. And I feel like I still am.

BLVR: Did some of your extended-singing techniques come from
imitating sounds in the world?

MP: Well, from a young age I was definitely imitating birds,
but I didn’t know it at the time. This is what my parents tell me. Once I
started making these weird sounds with my voice, they gave me this little
flexi-disc of mouth sounds, like guys that could make odd sounds. I don’t know
why they gave it to me, but that was one of my favorite records. It all comes
from what I’ve discovered and the things I’ve been able to try. Play with a
saxophone player and a drummer, see what happens. I’m not a studied, learned,
academic musician.

BLVR: You’ve played with a lot of musicians who are learned,
though.

MP: Those are the people you learn from. I think that one of
the things that really cracked my head open was starting to improvise, after I
met John Zorn. He encouraged me. And when you come from a band- and song-based
background, it’s like, How do you improvise? I mean, that’s literally the way
that I thought: Well, what do I do if I don’t know what I’m doing? He’s like,
“That’s the whole point.” And when you start to kind of immerse yourself in
that improvisation culture, you gotta be comfortable enough with your
instrument to throw yourself into a really potentially dangerous situation.
Sometimes that’s not so kind for the audience, but, hey, I’m not sure that
we’re really here for an audience.

BLVR: You’ve played in a bunch of his improv game pieces.

MP: Lots of ’em.

BLVR: How does it work to be a player in those?

MP: They’re basically guided improvisational pieces. So
there is no planned music. There are just rules on when certain people play,
what they play, and sometimes how they play. There’s a group of sixteen
musicians, or twelve, or whatever—it’s usually ten plus—and the musicians are
actually guiding the music. I don’t know if you’ve seen a “Cobra”—

BLVR: I have.

MP: A lot of people will raise their hand, and they make a
call: “I want to hear the cello, violin, and electronics.” But you have to know
the signals to tell him. And then what Zorn is, he’s just a signpost.

BLVR: He holds up a card.

MP: Yeah, he holds a card up. It’s actually a really
brilliant way of conducting improvisation. I hate to say it, but a group of
strangers left to their own devices will just play all the time and it won’t be
as musical as it should be. So this is a really great way, I think, of
controlling this chaotic cloud of everybody who wants to play all the time.
[Pauses] Hey, I’ve gotta take a blazing leak. Is there a bathroom?

BLVR: Uh, yeah, the bathroom is—just walk upstairs and then
go right, and then it’s just down the hall.

MP: Sorry, man, I should have done it on the way in.

BLVR: No, by all means, especially if it’s blazing.

II. NOW PICTURE THIS

MP: Where were we?

BLVR: We were talking about “Cobra.”

MP: It’s interesting when you do something like that. You
can really find out very quickly about a player’s personality. Like if they’re
constantly going, “Me! Me! Me! I want to play!” Because it’s a player-directed
game. It’s sport. It’s all based on whatever that person—that particular player
who’s playing—how they interact with the other people who are playing at that
particular time.

BLVR: And then with a group like Moonchild, which is also
with Zorn, is there written music?

MP: In theory, yes. But—

BLVR: But you’re not much of a music reader.

MP: No. Zero. I don’t read anything. But Moonchild is a
specific thing. Normally, most of Zorn’s projects are very written and very
structured—apart from this “Cobra” stuff—but Moonchild, when he started it, the
way that he described it to me was that he wanted to use the oral tradition of
rock music. He’s like, “I want to do it the way that you guys do it.” I’m like,
“What do you mean, the way we do it?” He’s like, “The way you, like, hum each
other a riff and then you jam it out for a while, and then you record it.”
That’s normal for me. But for him that’s exotic.

BLVR: The live show I saw sounded almost exactly like the
record. Was that the idea?

MP: Yeah. In a sense, they sound chaotic and maybe a little
bit haphazard, but they’re not. That’s the funny thing, and I think the thing
that is very easy to misconstrue. I get that all the time with Fantômas. “Wow,
you guys just go up there and improvise.” And my response is always, “Wow, if
we could improvise that well, it’d save me a hell of a lot of time and energy.”
But no, it’s very well-constructed extreme elements. Fantômas is scripted 100
percent.

BLVR: And when you say “scripted”—

MP: With music like Fantômas, you kind of have to write it
down, because it changes so quickly. Things are happening so fast that you have
to always be thinking, What’s coming next? So I think it’s really important for
that band—and all of us have learned to do this—we all write out our own notes.
So, for instance, Trevor [Dunn], the bass player, who’s very musically learned,
writes it out in traditional notation. I’ll do it in pictograms. [Dave]
Lombardo [of Slayer] does it in sort of drum notation. Buzz [Osborne, of the
Melvins], I don’t know what he… his notes are the most impossible to decipher.

BLVR: I mean, that’s how I would do it in bands growing up.
You just, you learn the language—

MP: Of that situation. Totally. The great thing about
Fantômas was that we got to a point where we didn’t need notes, and that’s
amazing. Like we’re doing all this insane stuff, and it’s just natural.

BLVR: I find it’s easiest to get into that mode on tour,
playing the same music every night. You stop thinking about it.

MP: That’s one of the great things about touring. It makes
you machinelike in a way that you can re-create this music not only in the
right way but even better than when it was conceived.

BLVR: So if you don’t write music in a traditional way, how
have you been writing all the chamber music you’ve been doing for film in
recent years?

MP: Well, I’ll hire a friend to do it for me, if necessary.
But a lot of it I’ll just write on my own in the studio. The studio is my main
compositional tool. And I used to be horrible in the studio. I didn’t know any
kind of technical stuff. But when you have something in your head, you’ve gotta
figure out a way of executing it.

BLVR: A lot of your recent music is specifically for film,
but your whole career has cinematic influences, from direct references to
covers to borrowing techniques from film scores. Would you say you think about
music in a visual way?

MP: Absolutely. I mean, with pretty much every musical
situation that I’ve been in, like Faith No More, especially, we always would
say, “Picture Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas.” And we’d use moments like
that. Or the pistol-whipping scene in Goodfellas. I recorded just a few weeks
ago with Zorn, and we were kind of trying to come up with a vocal approach to a
certain piece, and I said to him, “I’m kind of hearing, like, the narrator in
Alphaville.” You know that Godard movie where he’s had his throat blown out in
war so he’s got one of those electronic ones? And Zorn’s like, “Perfect!” So
it’s a point of reference that you can use. Instead of saying, “Hey, a quarter
note here and an eighth note there and a minor seventh…” No. To me it works
much better to say, “Now picture this.”

BLVR: Films can capture an atmosphere so well, and people
can just instantly access it from sound or story or visuals.

MP: It’s true. There’s a lot of musicality in film. You’re,
you know, in the studio and you’ve got to make a decision in five minutes.
Think about Tarkovsky. Think about Lynch. Think about Maya Deren.

BLVR: It’s interesting to think there are generations of
musicians now who are influenced by film more than music.

MP: It’s one more musical tool. One more part of the
vocabulary.

III. SPRAYING DIARRHEA OVER AN ENTIRE BODY OF WORK

BLVR: How do you write your lyrics?

MP: I really don’t enjoy writing lyrics at all. I feel like
I’m not very good at it. I’m not sure why. I think it comes from early band
days where we’d have all the music written and I’d know I had a studio date the
next day, so I’d put on a few pots of coffee and just try and write everything
at that moment. I don’t know why, but there’s a certain element of panic in
writing lyrics that I’m not sure I enjoy. I don’t write lyrics first, ever.
I’ve never done that. So, in a sense, the lyrics are a bit of an
afterthought—it’s music first. I haven’t found a way to make lyrics super
musical. That’s one of the main reasons, like, especially with Fantômas, I
wrote all this really complex music and I’m like, “I can’t write words to
this.” It’s gotta be preverbal. I gotta just be making sounds. I gotta be,
like, a second guitar player. That’s the only way that this is going to work.
There’s already too much information. So in most cases, if I’m writing words,
I’ll do a baby-talk version first to see if those sounds work. Then I’ll try
and find words that fit those sounds.

BLVR: So the words are just mimicking sounds. They’re not
trying to carry meaning.

MP: The idea, at least in rock or pop culture, that the
singer is on some pedestal in Speaker’s Corner—I’ve just never subscribed to
that. I’m not a poet. I’m not up onstage to get something off my chest. I’m
making musical statements, or, most of the time, musical questions for people
to figure out, and I’m not going to get in the way of that.

BLVR: You’ve done some voice work for films and video games.
How did you approach those?

MP: I did a lot of voice-overs for this movie I Am Legend a
few years ago, and they said, “How do you want to do it?” And I just walked
into the room—they had a giant freakin’ movie screen in front of me and a
microphone—and they would play me the scene once, so I could understand, more
or less, what was happening. And then they’d say, “OK, concentrate on this
character. That guy with the green eyes. That zombie.” And so I’d do a pass.
And they’d say, “Yeah. Pretty good. Try it again.” I’d do it again. Like three
or four times, I’d get it. And it’s really a natural way to record.

BLVR: Which film scores have been important to you?

MP: In general, the more subtle a score is, the more
effective it is for me. I think The Conversation would be a good example of
that. It’s literally a freakin’ solo piano. And The Third Man, obviously,
because it’s one instrument. I really like that approach. I’ve always wanted to
do something—just choose an instrument, stick with it. It’s very hard to do
these days. But if The Conversation were made now, you know it would be a full
orchestra.

BLVR: Like everything else in film scores.

MP: But then, you know, that’s not to say—I mean, look,
obviously the [Sergio] Leone movies were incredible, and they were really
overblown and quite orchestrated, but I think the genius in those—and maybe
this is really an important thing—is that it’s not really about how good the
music is or how good the film is, it’s about how they work together. And Leone
was one of the guys, one of the few guys, who would cut scenes to the music.
That’s why that shit works so well. He’d get a cue from [longtime collaborator
Ennio] Morricone and he’d cut the scene around it, sometimes shoot a scene
around it. Which is completely the opposite of how it works normally,
especially now, where the music, unfortunately, is one of the last things that
they think about. The music is thought of as—it’s almost like when they’re
doing the typeface for the credits. “Oh yeah, the music! Oh yeah, I guess we
gotta have some music. Wow. Just throw some shit in there.” So it’s not thought
of as an integrated part of the fabric of the movie. I’m working on this film
now where I’m really feeling good about working with the director. It’s called
The Place Beyond the Pines.

BLVR: Often in films it will already be so clear from the
scene what emotion they’re trying to evoke, and then they try to evoke the same
emotion in the music, creating this head-bashing sentimentality.

MP: Well, yeah. Like, if I were really strapped and I couldn’t
find any other reference point, if someone said, “Blue,” I’d go, “OK, I think I
can do blue.” I think that if you’re doing music for film, then you’re tapping
into that stream somehow, at least in your own mind. Whether the people get it
or not is another thing. And if that’s not synchronized, it’s super
frustrating. And sometimes it’s really hard to articulate. Sometimes you just
gotta let it go. Even if it sounds great and everybody’s happy, you’re just
like, That’s not quite the way I wanted it. Ah, well, I failed.

BLVR: How often do you think you’ve failed?

MP: Oh, all the time.

BLVR: Looking back, do you see mistakes in the music you’ve
made?

MP: I have a hard time listening to my own music. Like, if
you put on my record I’d just start cringing right now. Not because, you know,
I’m Mr. Shy or anything, it’s because if I really were to sit down and listen,
I hear the mistakes. You don’t hear the good things. But that’s changed a
little recently. When you get older, you let go a little more. When Faith No
More did a reunion tour, I had to relearn all the stuff I wrote when I was
nineteen. And I actually heard more good things than I remembered. It made the
entire thing really pleasant, like a homecoming.

But all the mistakes are little tiny little technical
things, anyway, like, I shouldn’t have sung that that way, or, Oh, I was flat
there. It’s not like, Oh, I shouldn’t have made this record. Because I feel
like even if maybe I don’t like a particular record, it was a step in the
process and I must have learned something from it. I think that’s more of a
mature viewpoint. If you’d asked me that ten years ago, I’d have gone, “Oh,
this record sucks and that’s bullshit,” but it all had to happen.

BLVR: Is the Faith No More reunion still happening?

MP: It’s sort of petered out. We’re also maybe a little too
conscious for our own good. Meaning there’s a lineage of bands that maybe did
some nice things and then needed the cash and got back together and basically
just sprayed diarrhea over their entire body of work. We’re very worried about
that. We don’t want to overdo it.

IV. SHUFFLE

BLVR: From what I’ve read in the past, you seem to have a
bleak view of contemporary music. Do you feel that way still?

MP: Who doesn’t?

BLVR: I don’t.

MP: Well, that’s why I try not to get too excited about it.
If you have the time and energy to find it, there’s people doing great things,
whether in a basement like this or even some arena. I guess I’m not really so
sensitive to musical climates. Let’s put it that way.

BLVR: But you run a label, so in some ways you must be
engaged.

MP: One of the reasons I believe that our label has done OK
and has survived for ten-plus years is because we don’t have a niche. When we
started, turntablism was the shit, but I didn’t put out every turntablist known
to man. The same thing with indie rock. It’s just, you see these things come in
and out of fashion. Does it mean that they’re any less good before they were
popular? No. There’s a continuum of great things. And we put out what we think
is great, regardless of whether it’s relevant or speaks to the modern… you
know, the modern man. We’ve done country records, techno records, spoken word,
comedy, improv—you name it.

BLVR: With all the different forms of music you play, do you
consider their respective cultures and contexts?

MP: I mean, take the psychology out of it, and still, all
those musics have a certain set of parameters and rules, in a sense. And they
need to be performed in a certain way, composed in a certain way, and, I think,
seen in a certain way. That’s why at a Mondo Cane show I’m not going to go up
there—

BLVR: Shirtless—

MP: —and spit all over myself. I think that would cheapen
the music. I can do that in a different band, you know what I mean? If I wanna,
you know, swallow someone’s vomit, I can do that with Tomahawk [Patton’s band
with members of Jesus Lizard and Battles]. I guess one of the reasons I have
all these different bands is because I like to contextualize them. I like to
put them in different compartments. I think if you took most of my projects and
put them into one band, put them in a blender, it would really sound like shit.
It would not be fun.

BLVR: And you think this separation helps the appreciation
of the music?

MP: Of that particular music? Yeah. Of me in general?
Probably not. It’s actually not a wise career move, business move, because it’s
confusing. No one knows what the hell I’m doing. It’s not like all the projects
are even under my name. Some of them are band concepts. Some are collaborative
efforts. Some are just me. Some are with an orchestra. If I were on a major
label and wasn’t controlling my own destiny, so to speak, they would have cut
my head off long ago.

BLVR: So if you were to play Mondo Cane in front of, say, a
mosh pit—

MP: We’ve done it.

BLVR: And was it successful?

MP: I’ll tell you a story. This was an enlightening moment.
We were on a tour with Mondo Cane, and we were playing theaters and churches
and all the right places. And everything’s going great. Then we had a show in
Finland, in the north of Finland, at a festival, which already was like, “Oh
boy…” Festivals in general, for that stuff, with that setup and everything,
are—I was worried about it. But then I found out it was a metal festival. And I
was furious. I was like, “This is gonna bomb.” Not for me—I was worried about
the rest of the musicians and about preserving the integrity of the music. I
mean, we were playing all this quiet orchestral stuff in front of a bunch of
pierced and tattooed Vikings? I don’t know. You tell me how wrong I was. So we
played, and there were twenty thousand people or something—it was one of the
bigger crowds we’d ever played to—and not only was it a success, people were
stunned—quiet. So we got offstage, and stagehands who had been helping us all
day were in tears. They said [in a Finnish accent], “This is the most beautiful
music I ever heard.” So there really is no way of knowing.

BLVR: People I know who grew up listening to you, they ended
up going so many directions musically, largely because your music was an
entrance into so many other genres.

MP: That’s about as good a compliment as you can get. It’s
amazing to me that people have paid enough attention to what I’ve done to even
shake a stick at it. Especially because I haven’t made it easy. I haven’t made,
let’s just say, typical decisions. As cynical as I can be, when people say,
“Yeah, I love what you did with the [hip-hop collective] X-Ecutioners and also
with that German doom band,” it always takes me aback.

BLVR: I think it’s getting increasingly that way, with iPods
and the internet and constant shuffle-mode—people’s listening habits are less
prejudiced.

MP: I mean, I would hope so. Shuffle—when I first discovered
it, I was in heaven. Because that’s just the way I listen to music, and that’s
the way it always comes out.